Animated ‘Batman: Year One’ Movie Signs Bad-Ass Voice Cast

The Straight-to-Video company DC Animated has quietly been producing many of the best superhero movies around lately, including Batman: Under the Red Hood and All Star Superman. Now they're set to continue that tradition with an adaptation of Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's seminal work Batman: Year One. The comic book min-series was a profound inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, detailing the period between Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham City and his first adventures as The Dark Knight. The film is set to premiere at San Diego Comic Con this summer.

Hollywood Reporter has released some new images from the upcoming film, and announced a pretty stellar voice cast for the production. Junebug star Ben McKenzie has been tapped to play Bruce Wayne, with Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston playing Detective Gordon, Dollhouse's Eliza Dushku playing Seline Kyle/Catwoman,and Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff playing Detective Sarah Essen, Gordon's love interest.

DC Animated producer Bruce Timm had this to say on the upcoming film's faithfulness to the original series: "The source material is surprisingly cinematic; it's a pretty straight forward literal retelling… Mazzucchelli's artwork is beautifully composed and we were able to refer to the comic for about 80 percent of the camera setups."

Timm knows what he's doing. We couldn't be less worried about this project.

Incidentally, have you ever seen Crave Online in the same room as Batman? Suspicious, isn't it?